Dungeons and Dragons…and Spellcasters?

You may have figured this out, but my boyfriend Shane likes to introduce me to geeky things.

One of the recent chapters in that particular adventure is that I’ve taken up learning to play D&D. It’s a little hypocritical because I was definitely the kid who hardcore judged the nerds back in high school, but somebody had to do it.

I’m ashamed it was me, but I’ve repented, seen the light, and made the switch.

Of course, starting to play went about as smoothly as you might imagine, given it’s me.

My first game was super last-minute. Shane invited me along maybe three hours or so before the game, which of course threw me into a panic. I couldn’t show up at the party unprepared! This princess needed a gown, and it was time to pick the fabric.

So, I chose my character: an ifrit.

I didn’t really think about why at the time, but in retrospect, it was a perfect fit. Passionate, fickle, and mildly reminiscent of an iconic Disney villain. How could I not love it?

Next, I chose my character’s class: a witch.

Full disclosure: I don’t regret this decision, but I definitely did not think it through. I was so excited by the prospect of making my first character that I just picked the word I recognized best and went with it.

Add to that my love of Harry Potter and belief that Hermione equals badass, and the decision makes a lot of sense.

To make everything a little easier for the noob, the GM and another player decided that they would make the character for me. Three hours later, I showed up at the game and had a half-ifrit, half-rakshasa witch with sub-class sorcerer to contend with.

Now. If you have ever played Pathfinder, you know the situation I was in. Here I was, green as a new spring leaf, with two completely different caster types to learn and a character who was a weird combination of a fire spirit and freaky tiger monster with reversed joints and inhabited by the spirit of a dead tyrant or a genocidal crazy (or both).

Aaaaand go.

Getting witchy with it

I actually did all right for a bit, learning my new character. It was quite fun throwing deadly hexes at baddies from across the room, but it really sucked when they decided to hit back.

Eventually, as we started leveling up, I realized it wasn’t enough to know one or two of my effective spells and then just hope my hexes could hit everything else.

I had to hunker down and do homework. Dun-dun-dun.

After several hours of poring over books and digging through the depths of the Internet, I learned that I had been leveling up all wrong anyway, which is fun. I didn’t see anything in the main books about it, but apparently, witches are supposed to learn two new spells in each spell level when they gain a caster level, so I was missing something like 50 spells.

Obviously, I wasn’t going to remember all of those spells. I’d had some cards saved on my phone for reference, so in a spurt of energy and anticipation of future laziness, I decided to print and cut them all out so I could take a literal deck of spell cards with me to the game. 12/10 recommend.